Remote Installation of Fedora Distributions Using PXE boot

If you want to deploy many machines, then it is a pain to go from machine to machine with 4 CDs. Like RIS (Remote Installation Service) in Windows, Fedora also offers you a similar remote installation facility via PXE LAN booting. For this, you will require a DHCP server, Apache and TFTP server running on Fedora.

Firstly, install Fedora completely. Then, on that machine, make a folder named /Fedora on root and copy all the contents of the Fedora CDs in this folder. Remember that you are mounting the CDs and copying the contents and not just copying the ISOs. While copying the files from the CDs, you will be asked for permission to overwrite few files and folders.

Once you have created a copy of the CDs on the machine, you have to create a kick start file, which has answers to the questions asked during the installation process.

To make this file, launch ‘kickstart’ from Start>Systems, this will open a GUI Kickstart configuration interface.

Here, you can set pre-installation settings such as keyboard type, language, time zone, mouse, display, root password, etc. Fill all the entries according to your setup requirements and save the file. It saves a file with name ks.cfg.

Copy this file to the location where you have copied the Fedora2006 files from the CD.

Host installerIn order to remotely install Fedora via HTTP, you have to configure apache server to host the installer. To do this, launch Start>system>HTTP. This will open an interface to configure the apache web server. Here, select the main tab and give the IP address of the same machine, where you are hosting the apache server. Next, select the ‘virtual host’ tab and select add new host and double click the new virtual host you have created. This will open its properties dialog. Here, under basic setup set the ‘document root directory’ to the location where you copied the Fedora CDs.

In our case it is /fedora. Now, from the same properties window, click on the performance tab and add the directory of your Fedora installer that you have copied above. Once you are through with this, save the settings by clicking the Ok button. After this, start apache server by issuing this command.

#service httpd start

Now, open a web browser and check that the web server is working properly. Make sure it displays the directory structure of the Fedora installer folder on the web page.

The next step is to configure TFTP server on your installer server in such a way that it can remotely boot another PC over a network. In order to do this, open a terminal and issue the following commands.

(Here 192.168.3.1 is the IP address of the hosting server, where you have hosted the Fedora installer, you should change it according to your settings).

After this you have to enable the TFTP server so that the TFTP server

automatically gets started on booting the Fedora server. For doing this, run ‘setup’ command from the terminal. It will open a CLI interface, here select ‘Services’ and from the list select ‘tftp’ by pressing space bar key and click the Ok button to save the settings .

Configure DHCP server

Now, you have to configure the DHCP server on your installation server, so that the diskless clients can get IP addresses from the RIS server and remotely boot and start the Fedora installer. To do this open the /etc/dhcpd.conf file and add the following lines as shown below.

Boot the client machines from the Remote Installation Server and you will get the Installer booting screen. Thereafter, and you can start the installation process on it.

Troubleshooting – Client not booting?

If your PC is not booting off the remote boot server, then two things could be wrong. Firstly, its network card may not be PXE boot enabled. If it is PXE enabled, check the BIOS to see whether the boot from network option is enabled